Windows Live Writer

Wait… what? Jason’s using a windows editor for blogging? Last time I wrote about an editor was when I tried out MarsEdit for the Mac. My buddy Steve was looking for an app that would let him write blog posts while offline. He was checking out a few of them and I remembered Microsoft Live Writer and suggested it to him. I thought I’d give it a try as well since from the number of posts I’ve done with MarsEdit I didn’t use it every much.

One of the things that I miss when using an editor such as this is that I can’t use any of the wordpress specific functions. One of which is PodPress for when I’m posting a podcast. Or using custom fields for when I’m wanting to display some embed tag that wordpress will normally muck up using the EmbedIt plugin. To be quite honest I could just save the post as a draft and then add in those tags or use those wordpress editor only features from the website. EmbedIt mainly just makes it so that wordpress wont mess up the tags and begin replacing things. You pop in a token {HTML1} into the editor and using the custom fields areas you’d put in HTML1 as the field name and the embed tag as the value. Without having to do all that XMLRCP (the way that these blogging applications interact with the blog software) bypasses the area of code that wordpress would use to change these embed tags so it’s not really affected by that.

It looks as if video does post just fine using Windows Live Writer and wordpress without the need of Embedit. If I were to try and edit this post in wordpress then save if I’d imagine it would break the embed and really mess things up.